"Playing the race card" is an idiomatic phrase that refers to the exploitation by someone of either racist or anti-racist attitudes in the audience in order to gain an advantage.^[1][2][3] It constitutes an accusation of bad faith directed at the person or persons raising concerns as regards racism.^[4]

The phrase is generally used by people to allege that someone has deliberately and falsely accused another person or group of people of being a racist in order to gain some sort of advantage.^[4][5] An example of this use of the term occurred during the O. J. Simpson murder case, when critics accused the defense of "playing the race card",^[6] in presenting Mark Fuhrman's past as reasons to draw his credibility as a witness into question.

Stanford Law School professor Richard Thompson Ford has argued that the race card can be played independently of the person making the claim, or the race in question. An example cited was the Hillary Clinton campaign's assertion that Barack Obama won the 2008 Democratic primary in South Carolina owing to the disproportionate number of black registered Democrats in the state, implying more racism in the general population.^[7]

George Dei, et al., in the book Playing the Race Card,^[8] argue that the term itself is a rhetorical device used in an effort to devalue and minimize claims of racism.

The phrase has been used to describe racist mobilisations by politicians, as for example with the campaign to elect Peter Griffiths, the Conservative Party candidate for Smethwick in the 1964 UK general election. However, the term was only applied to describe this situation in the 1980s.^[9]

• Appeal to motive
• Boerehaat
• Call-out culture
• Identity politics
• Laissez-faire racism
• Race baiting
• Wedge issue
• Woman card
• Weaponization of antisemitism